Cooking Sugar Syrups

To help you visualize what happens, we prepared some sugar syrups for you. We dissolved sugar in water and brought it to the boil.

Next, we placed a thermometer in the syrup and cooked the solution until it had reached a set temperature. We immediately turned off the heat, poured the syrup in a cool bowl to cool down. Once the syrup had cooled down to room temperature we poked and prodded in the syrup, trying to see what would happen.

We recorded how they flowed, which you can see in the video below. Notice how the consistency of the sugar syrups changes when they’ve been boiled to a higher temperature!

Initially, the cooled down sugar syrups would still flow. But, they’d become thicker and thicker, until they barely flow at all.